Congress recently passed a “continuing resolution” to avoid a government shutdown. We are good to go now. Government agencies may continue to operate while Congress tries to agree on the actual budget for the 2025 fiscal year that started on October 1st.
A continuing resolution (CR) is commonly called a “stopgap.” In fact, a Google search yields almost no other modern uses of the term. But is “stopgap” an appropriate term for this thing?
Modern dictionaries define stopgap as a “temporary expedient,” a solution “until something better or more suitable can be found.” Etymological dictionaries trace it to the literal plugging up of openings—dikes, hedgerows, and shield walls used against restless seas, impertinent cattle, and bloodthirsty Vikings.
A stopgap seems a commendable solution—a less-submerged Netherlands and a less-pillaged England. But is a continuing resolution “stopgap” similarly commendable? It may be worthwhile to put this metaphor aside and examine the down-and-dirty of this practice of government.
US Stopgapping
Congress has relied on CRs in all but four years from 1977 to 2025. On average, a CR (or series of CRs) will last for about 137 days, or over a third of each year. CRs have become a normal course of business. CRs give specific direction for how to manage money, and the merit of CRs must be assessed through the effects these directions have. The typical CR directs agencies to do as they did in the prior year. This means: same budget, same purposes, no new initiatives, no accelerations of efforts.
Such direction seems innocuous. If what was done was good, then continuing must still be good—or at least good enough. However, the lived experience by one particular agency, the Department of Defense, highlights how damaging the guidance to “keep calm and carry on” is.
First-Order Effects
We do not live in a static world. The most obvious problem with CRs is that they miss that simple fact. Having to use last year’s budget dollar amounts means inflation is allowed to erode buying power. Since the DoD is not permitted to save money across fiscal years for lean times, the impacts are immediately observable.
Training, travel, and relocations for career development start to lag. Civilian hires and military accessions fall as much as 20 percent during this time. Empty seats appear and military operations slow. Then the DoD has little choice but to cut contractors. Research languishes, production slows, and expertise is lost.
Meanwhile, having to use last year’s budget plan means new things cannot happen. This year, the CR stops 168 new acquisition projects from starting, 101 existing programs from ramping up to meet delivery timetables, and 135 construction projects from breaking ground.
These stoppages have cascading effects. First, since military acquisitions are a complex puzzle of interrelated deliverables, grotesque gaps occur. B-52’s may fly this year but with outdated radars; new pilots will enter the service but won’t get access to new trainers; aircraft carriers and submarines are scheduled for drydock but won’t get their modernization; a hundred new missile silos stand ready but may get no missiles to fill them.
Second, these stoppages create funding disconnects. The $49.6 billion needed for new projects only was possible by identifying older, less-valued projects to be curtailed or canceled. While a CR delivers money, the money remains earmarked for the old things the military no longer values. The money, therefore, sits there, useless for both purposes.
CR math gets ugly quickly. About 3.2 percent of buying power is lost to inflation from last year. Perhaps an additional 0.8 percent is lost to additional cost growth which is common to defense industries and their civilian counterparts. Then, another 5.9 percent of the DoD budget is left idle because of disconnects. In total, the DoD works with maybe 9.9 percent less buying power during a CR. The swampy feeling underfoot suggests that “stopgap” may not be the right metaphor.
Second-Order Effects
Then transaction costs or—perhaps better yet—reaction costs amount. Risk aversion flows through the system. DoD may only get, say, 95 percent of last year’s monthly budget during a CR—just in case money is needed for emergent needs. The Pentagon then also takes a cut just in case. Headquarters of the services do the same.
To return to the math, a lower organization might get only 90 percent of a monthly budget which already has only 90.1 percent of the buying power. That means it has just 81.9 percent buying power during a CR!
It is small consolation that the full money will likely eventually arrive. There are no payday loans for the DoD. A 18.1 percent constraint—compounded by the ambiguities of what purchases are actually allowable within the dense network of annual Congressional controls—leads to anxious and inefficient practices.
Financial managers are forced to build short-term spend plans—looking out just a few weeks—then send them up for approval to get configured into the larger portfolio of needs. Then they do it again and again. The administrative burden is heavy, the scrutiny intense, the environment is fearful. Plans end up showing more caution than reason.
Similarly, contracting officers can only write contracts with small periods of performance—as short as just a few days—then again and again. They are repeatedly flirting with expensive errors, and thus they tend to choose contract types based on simplicity of execution instead of effectiveness and efficiency.
When CRs end, the damage is not done. Suddenly, the cost landscape looks different. Contractor overhead rates increase as a result of the expensiveness of dealing with such a manic government. Small-batch purchases have replaced the more efficient large-batch purchases which would require more stability than the DoD has. Then, at the end of the year, low-value (arguably wasteful) purchases increase as organizations rush to spend their belated windfall.
The push-and-pull of a year with CRs is an undeniable reality. The wastefulness of churn, disorder, and caution slingshot into the inefficient frenzy of clean-up and catch-up.
Conclusion
The linguistics of “stopgap” changed in the mid-20th century. Stopgaps used to describe discreet things: jobs, weapons, bridges, short-term tax rates, snacks, small comforts for travelers, cheap conversation to pass the time, even trysts. These were all focal and temporary “plugs”—a finger in a dike.
CRs bear no resemblance to such historical stopgaps. CRs are applied too broadly, too lengthily, and too repeatedly. As such, they do not plug. They stoke the peaceful waters into storms which then swamp the land year after year, leaving it salted.
It is thus that military leaders use less complimentary language for CRs than do legislators. They describe CRs as forcing them to fight with one hand behind the back, or as dragging against their momentum. They fear the loss of fully productive time in the technological race against our near-pear adversaries who do not muck about with stopgaps and their illusions.
A different metaphor would suit what a CR does. I suggest we dig up an old slang word of American origin, an Americanism suited to this uniquely American malpractice. I suggest we call a CR a “jackleg.” A jackleg is a temporary fix like a stopgap, but it is a fraudulent one from those who are “incompetent, unskillful, or dishonest.”
When we use the right metaphor, we will get the right reaction. CRs should offend Americans. CRs are not a natural product of the democratic process; they are an invented license to fail in the democratic process. They are not praiseworthy examples of “bipartisanship”; they are case studies in destructive collusion and alibi-making.
We should forbid jacklegs, plain and simple. We should demand that Congress does its job and passes a budget by October 1 each year. If it cannot, government should be required to shut down, revealing to all that legislators have been unable to do the profession granted them by the Constitution and constituency.
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